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I like things like prosody, grammar, and music theory because I like to look at how things work as systems. I guess literary too, but not a...

Wednesday, March 8, 2017

Preface

This book will
instruct you on many things that you can do with poetry that do not involve textualanalysis. It differs, then, from other textbooks of poetry that propose
nuanced close reading as their almost exclusive goal. While I by no means
disdain this sort of attention to the poetic art, I would like to propose an
alternate approach that begins by purposely removing it from the picture. The justifcation
for such a conspicuous omission is that the prominence of analysis in the
academic study of poetry (and what other kind is there, you might ask?) has led
to a distortion that ends up alienating potential readers as well as
marginalizing poetry as an arcane subject within academia itself. What happens
when we approach poetry without the aim of dissecting it? We are about to find
out.

Other art forms
might require specialized instruction for their full “appreciation,” but only
with poetry do we demand that technical expertise come first. Imagine demanding
that students who have never listened to music perform complex harmonic
analysis—an activity that often seems sterile and forbidding even to otherwise dedicated
musical performers. Such students would be right to resent a seemingly
pointless exercise. A more fruitful approach would acknowledge that many
listeners have no desire to learn to read music or learn a specialized
technical vocabulary.

Textbooks of
poetic analysis are designed to teach the student how to take apart the poem as
an object on the page. The New Criticism, a movement that took hold of English
departments in the middle years of the past century, produced a long string of
such books, beginning with Cleanth Brooks’s and Robert Penn Warren’s Understanding Poetry. Others include
John Ciardi’s How Does a Poem Mean?,
John Frederick Nims’s Western Wind,
X. J. Kennedy’s An Introduction to Poetry,
and Lawrence Perrine’s Sound and Sense.
Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry
is the most recent addition to this genre by a major academic critic. Although
the New Criticism itself might be passé, its legacy lives on in practices of
analysis embodied by these textbooks and by the courses in which they are still
used. At its best, this pedagogy teaches the student sensitivity to the
subtleties of poetic tone and rhythm, the variability of speaking subjects, and
the complexities of metaphorical language. At its worst, though, I have found that
the goal of some pedagogy in this tradition is the identification of rhyme
schemes and the memorization of the names of rhetorical figures.

In contemporary literary
criticism, the analysis of texts has an ambivalent status. In some contexts it
appears, at least, to be highly esteemed, yet in practice it often ends up
being dull, plodding, or perfunctory. It is common to say, in book reviews for
example, that the textual analyses are sensitively handled, but that the critic
has not been able to put them to good use in promoting a more compelling
thesis. Nobody is fooled by such faint praise. Close reading, when it is not
very deep, can seem vaguely high-schoolish, even when the practitioner is a university
professor.

There is something
to admire in the legacy of New Critical pedagogy, and I could attempt to write
another textbook along those lines. Like other academics I believe myself to be
an expert analyst, and I have my own ideas about how to go about the process.
Although it remains a significant skill in some, limited contexts, I believe
that the best way of approaching it is to come back to it after exploring
other, less analytical approaches. I have seen students, even promising
graduate students, struggle to find something meaningful at all to say about a
poem. The problem seems to be that the methods of analysis have become stale
through over-familiarity. Students who don’t know why they should care about
analyzing a text are likely to produce observations that are relevant to any
larger context or concern.

My idea, then, has
been to produce an anti-textbook,
designed as a counterweight to the less felicitous side effects of New Critical
styles of “close reading.” The close ties between the New Criticism and the
so-called “academic poetry” of this period continues to narrow the range poetry
considered in textbooks, to the detriment of experimental alternatives. While
New Criticism was allegedly “formalist,” it neglected prosody or dealt with it inadequately.
As a corollary, the performance of poetry almost never appears in this
pedagogy, which emphasized the poem as a static object on the page.

Also absent from
the New Critical legacy is a larger sense of the varied uses of poetry outside the classroom: people write poems for their
lovers; they use poetry as part of their spiritual practices; they set it to
music and sing it; they memorize and recite it; they incorporate iit into works
of calligraphy or other forms of visual art. These practices typically do not depends
on training in specifically academic modes of textual analysis—a practice that
is rather beside the point for people cannot see any use for poetry in the
first place. Imagine teaching music theory to people who had almost never heard
music with any real pleasure, who had never played or sung it, danced along to
it. The technical details of this theory, after all, can seem barren even to
dedicated musicians.

In the academic
context, understanding poetry has often meant understanding the meanings of poems, or being able to
justify a given interpretation through detailed analysis of poetic techniques.
It is telling that in the college classroom reading
has often become a synomym for interpretation.
The word reading, though, encompasses
a potentially wider range of response. For me, understanding poetry is more
like understanding music: being able to follow along and enjoy what is
happening, understanding why someone would think a song or composition makes
sense or adds up to something larger (or doesn’t), understanding the roles that
music plays in everyday life, from dancing to meditation.